Vino Nobile di Montepulciano

For the rest of your life, you will compare every wine you taste to this wine, my host father told me late one October evening.

The wine he referred to was Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, which we drank with each meal at his table. Its taste was crisp and clean. It warmed my throat with every sip.

One warm fall afternoon, my host parents took fellow host daughter Dallas and me with them to the tiny Tuscan hill town of Montepulciano and the Nobile vineyard located there. My host parents had been clients of this family for decades, travelling there several times each year to buy a supply of table wine, which they transported home in large glass jugs. At home, my host father had his own vacuum seal bottling machine, which he used to transfer the wine into smaller bottles for the table.

It was one of my first trips into the Tuscan countryside and I was awestruck by the views, the rolling hills, the golden vineyards, the way my stomach dropped when my host dad took narrow blind cliffside curves at harrowing speeds in his tiny sedan.

At the vineyard, my host parents were greeted as old family friends by the winemaker. While they exchanged news, I selected a wine to buy for myself. It was under ten euro, a very recent vintage.

I drank that bottle of wine a few nights ago. I always meant to open it sooner, but something in me held me back. It was the only bottle of wine I brought back to the states with me in January 2009, along with an embarrassingly large stash of chocolate. The chocolate is now long gone, thanks to a family of mice who nested in the walls around my dorm room last winter. But the wine remained, proof that the whole trip hadn’t been just a lovely but impossible dream.

With my January 3 ticket to Italy now booked, it felt finally right to open that bottle.

When the first sip of wine touched my tastebuds, it transported me back to the Italian kitchen in which I passed so many happy moments with a wonderful family.

It’s not only the taste of the wine that I’ll compare all future experiences against.